The Berlin Wall’s ups and downs

When it fell on November 9th, 1989, I was too young to understand the historical significance of the news of its demise.

The actual tearing down started the following summer and would last for more than a year and a half.

The first time I went to Berlin I visited an exhibition – the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall was coming up – and I was very moved, ending up reading for hours about how it affected the people in Berlin and the rest of Germany. Breaking families in half, separating lovers, siblings and children from parents.

Since then Berlin during the Cold War has fascinated me and I’ve read lots of books and watched documentaries, especially about Stasi. Of all the hobbies… Anyway.

And perhaps it’s nice to be reminded that history, occasionally, moves in the right direction.

Comments

As a youngster in the antipodes, the Berlin Wall was just something one heard about in the news occasionally. Then, studying German in high school, the German teacher (of German origins herself) brought a book along that was sold at Checkpoint Charlie.

Those photos of the soldier leaping over the wire, of the mattress-bearing crowd persuading the old lady to jump, and most of all of young Peter Fechter bleeding to death while two world powers stood by and did nothing…really brought it home to me that what sounded like an unreal situation could be only too real (and those photos were a good 15 years old by then), that the Cold War was alive and well, and was personified in that wall. It just haunted me.

Went on a guided Cold War tour the second time I visited Berlin. Saw all those spots you mention. Was really moved and found it absolutely fascinating. One of the highlights of any holiday I’ve been on, really.

Such an absurd situation and system, and so close to home and during my lifetime.

It’s hard to recall just how permanent it seemed. Like with Northern Ireland it was accepted by most of us as an impossible situation to resolve.

I was about to apologise for the obvious nature of this clip. However, it’s a song I have always had a lot of time for and continue to draw a great deal of inspiration from it. It’s a straightforward message of hope and optimism. Released only 4 years before the actual destruction of the wall, at the time it seemed pie in the sky. You live and learn.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who owns a small piece of it (bought from an official tourist shop by the Brandenburg Gate, not picked up from the streets in the heady days following reunification I should stress).

Come to think of it, I’ve got a little bit of Mauer in a box somewhere which would also qualify for the rock mementos thread as it was hacked off and brought back for me by a member of Cud, who were on tour over there at the time.

I remember, standing by the wall. 1983 I think it was. It was the proximity that was so strange, the guards (standing above our heads) were yards away but from a different world. More jarring even than the wall itself was the train journey through East Germany to Berlin. You could look but you couldn’t touch. Arriving that way you got a feel for how West Berlin was this tiny island in the middle of a hostile and unpredictable ocean.

Yes, I’ve got a piece of the wall in my attic, a tiny sliver of plaster mit farbe, sent by a friend who saw it come down.

I remember that Autumn of 1989 vividly, the sense of optimism and excitement was palpable even to my group of friends merely reading about and discussing the events in an East Yorkshire pub on Sunday lunchtimes. Looking back, it was an inevitable if protracted consequence of the change in mindsets orchestrated by Gorbachev, who I hold up as one of the great transformative figures of the last century. Obviously, once the glasnost genie was out of the bottle, it became unmanageable to the ways that he would have preferred, and ultimately caused his political demise; and that initial rush of hope at the fall of repressive communism is replaced by cynicism at their ruthless take on capitalism and their sham ‘democracy’.

Goes to show though, doesn’t it though, that music of poignancy that strikes a chord with the masses might come from anywhere.

To these ears, The Hoff and Scorpions are total bilge but they were there at the right time with the right songs. If anything happens of a similar nature in the UK, don’t be suprised if The Grumbleweeds theme song becomes the perfect piece of music, reflecting the mood of the nation.

I visited Berlin in autumn 1990 on a whim with an inter-rail ticket and ended up staying a week. I must have spent two days straight in the Checkpoint Charlie Museumhaus. It’s a city I instantly fell in love with, I should go back.

If only The Don had some proper foresight, he could have had the wall shipped over to Mexico.

I lived in various squats in West Berlin for about 6 months in 1982, having been inspired to go there by the movie Christiane F: Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo. Luckily for me, despite my initial intention I didn’t manage to become a heroin addict, though I did have a great time there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG6sXLQwlJU

My first visit to Berlin was in 1976. Like @chiz I arrived by train from Helmstadt. As we crossed the border my mate was on the toilet on the train. The East German border guards knocked the door with their rifle butts.
When we got to Berlin we stayed on a campsite in Wannsee and Allied military helicopters were circling overhead for hours on end.

Move forward to 1995 I meet my current wife who has a German mum who fled Berlin two weeks before the Berlin airlift. She was 19 and hungry and saw no future in post war Germany. She arrived in Scotland and met her husband. Before working on the trains he had experience of working in British Prisons. Early in their marriage she needed to go back to Germany to tend her ailing mother. At that time there we two children (my wife’s elder siblings) and he couldn’t cope with bringing them up on his own so got the train to Berlin to be with his wife. Needing a job he ended up at Spandau prison where Hess was incarcerated.

The Berlin of today is a wonderful city that we go back to fairly regularly and will be there at Easter.
However the edge of living on the faultline of the Cold War has gone and with it some of the intrigue and attraction of the City.

We went to Berlin in 2005, flying into an airport that was on the former Eastern side. We were a young couple, kids of 2 and 5 in tow.

This was of course many years after reunification but the severe, uniformed demeanour of the staff at the railway station next to the airport was almost comical. The machine to buy a ticket to get into town didn’t seem to be accepting cash or any non-domestic credit card payment. A woman, in full uniform and peaked cap stood “on watch” from a small control room scanning the station with her binoculars. She was one of a handful of staff that seemed to be running the station (not military) so I asked for help in stammering, stuttering German, gesturing to my small family, the unfathomable ticket machine and a wallet with euros in it.

It was the train station that took in passengers from the airport into Berlin, so I thought I might get a little more response than I received – which was a frosty dismissal in German, with her pointing in the vague direction of the platform. Presently, another passenger approached us speaking perfect Englsh and explained that you could only buy a ticket using a German bank card and that you can’t pay on the train itself. In return for some cash, he bought the tickets for us using his card.

I didn’t really describe her that well. She stood at the front of a large glass windowed ground-level “control room” on the platform. Her arms akimbo, fists clenched and motionless for minutes at a time – until something caught her eye. And then she was all about the binoculars.

That reminds me of a trip we made to Heidelburg Zoo – our daughter was 2 and a half and her cousin 18 months. It was quite a hot day and we rented kinder wagens in case the girls fell asleep. We could put them in the kinderwagen with a jumper to sleep on. Sure enough they fell asleep before we reached the end of the zoo. As we got to the exit we decided we would get lunch at the cafe which was just outside the entrance but part of and owned by the zoo. To rent the kinder wagens we had each paid a 50 euro refundable deposit. We tried to take the kinder wagens to the cafe. You cannot do that the woman official told us. ‘Es ist verboten’ we were told. Pretty sure she was a remnant from the Wehrmacht.

I have a book on the whole Inner German Border, of which the Berlin Wall is but a part, and it’s fascinating. One part I found particularly interesting was an interview with the bloke who had been leader of East Germany when the wall went up. He was apologetic but pragmatic about it. The East was haemorhaging tens of thousands of young people over the border each year and its population was skewing dangerously towards the unskilled and elderly. In addition, Berlin now had an underclass, as the purchasing power from those in the East was far lower than those in the West. Westerners would shop in the cheap East, and get preferential treatment for limited resources. At that stage, the leaders were still optimistic in their ideology, and they realised that a complete severance was the only chance they had of making it work.

I live quite close to the memorial in Mitte, on Bernauerstrasse. I still always get a bit of a jolt when walking over the lines in the pavement marking where the various section of the wall would run. This is a really interesting ‘then and now’ comparison…

A friend went over to Berlin at the beginning of November 1989 and went over into the East for a day. Unfortunately it was a couple of days before the wall opened up, so she missed the whole border-opening thing. By the time it happened she was back in London.